


a subitanea et improvisa morte

by Toft



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Murder Flirting, Technically almost everyone is dead, Weird necromantic stuff, but also an AU of canon, canon AU, no really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:48:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28141890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: One of Harrow's alternate scenarios strikes Abigail as having a little more promise than the others, so Harrow, a necromancer of marriageable age and tolerable habits, seeks to attract the eye of Her Imperial Highness.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 11
Kudos: 71
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	a subitanea et improvisa morte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inquisitor_tohru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/gifts).



> Well, this got weird! I handwaved the worldbuilding in a way that I hope is both canonical and true to canon in the sense that canon is pretty ambiguous. I hope you enjoy this, Yuletide Recipient!

“This still isn’t how it happens,” said Lady Abigail Pent. “But let’s see how this goes.”

A murmur passed through the crowd, now sweating in their ancestral robes, except for the Third House princess in the gold robes (if you could call them that), whose glowing visage kept snagging at the corner of Harrowhark’s eye. A throbbing pain was building behind her eyes; the music was too loud, the light too bright, the _smells_ – 

“Steady,” murmured Lady Pent beside her. She did not touch, but it was still an appalling breach. Harrowhark stiffened her back as the great doors swung open in a fanfare of gongs and feathers, and Her Divine Highness’ retinue began to file in. And file. And file. Last came Ortus the First, lyctor, the Emperor’s right hand, his outline pulsing with necromantic energy so profoundly that Harrowhark could barely look at him. The appearance of the Daughter of God, the Sheathéd Blade, was something of an anticlimax. Her costume, despite being made of material so diaphanous that it had the appearance of a night full of stars, had the distinct appearance of a straitjacket that had been bundled onto its wearer amid some resistance. Her face was entirely obscured by a veil not, in fact, unlike Harrowhark’s, she noted with a certain amount of smugness through the beating of blood in her temple. At one side of the veil, incredibly, a tuft of hair was visible. It was red. Beside her, Ortus muttered something that sounded like _may her darkness eclipse the stars forever_. 

The gongs beat once more. The star-bound figure came to an abrupt stop and made a slow turn, her invisible gaze scanning the room. Harrowhark, for no reason she could imagine, could not breathe. “Steady,” Pent murmured again. They had been over the next part every day for months. Each House in turn would present their candidate, a necromancer of marriageable age, plausible health, and, presumably, tolerable habits and looks. 

Her Divine Highness did not step forward to the prepared dais, but writhed, apparently wresting an arm free of her wraps. A ripple seemed to pass through the amphitheatre. Her Divine Highness’ arm – surprisingly muscular, Harrowhark noticed in a daze – extended. She pointed directly at the Ninth House’s little cluster. At Harrowhark. Ortus the First slowly rolled his eyes up in what appeared to be mute despair.

“Her,” she said. “The witchy one with the fucked up skull on her face.” 

She turned on her heel, scattering her retinue, and charged back towards the open doors.

“ _Hey_ ,” said the Third Princess, the first and loudest of a muttering tide of protests that beat against Harrowhark’s ears. Several imperial attendants peeled off after brief consultation with the Lyctor and hurried towards them, emissaries of the other Houses turned and craned towards the Ninth.

“Yes, this seems about right,” said Lady Pent. “Are you going to faint, Harrow?”

Humiliatingly, Harrowhark was.

She came to in a darkened room. There was muttering around her, the smell of old drapery, and the still-unnatural sound of rain. She was lying on something so soft that, on gaining consciousness, she felt nauseated and dizzy, as if she might sink down into the earth. She clung to the familiar discomfort of her starched skirt and the torc digging between her first and second cervical vertebrae.

“- can’t hold together much longer - ”

“ – parameters set by a traumatized teenager – ”

“ – seems to me that we should have stayed with the original scenario –”

“You were the one who said, and I quote, ‘If I have to look at another of those blasted organs I will throw myself into the River’ –”

Harrow twitched, involuntarily, and the voices stopped. There was a tap on the door of the chamber.

“Her Imperial Highness will grant her betrothed an audience in eight minutes time.”

“That’s our cue,” said Lady Pent. If Harrow hadn’t been distracted by the wave of dizziness as she sat up and the mortification that her skull had smeared, _damn it to hell_ , she might have wondered what the Fifth House necromancer and her cavalier (who was somehow still eating?) was doing here, and why she and Ortus seemed so chummy.

Her paint still wasn’t ideal when she was chivvied into a receiving hall. Long, heavy-looking curtains lined tall windows which showed the stars. This close in to Dominicus, they seemed dimmer than Harrow was used to, obscured by radiant gases. The room was lit by candles that burned brighter than in the Ninth – probably made from actual wax rather than many-times-reconstituted bone-tallow – but they did not hurt Harrow’s eyes. The figure at the far end of the room, however, did. The diaphanous fabric was gone; she now wore leggings and a sharply cut overtunic that evoked Cohort whites while looking a hundred times more expensive and yet somehow mistreated. She was polishing a sword. Her face was in shadow, and it did strange things to Harrow’s head to try to look at it, so she didn’t, even though, distantly, she realized it would probably be important. Rain clawed at the windows.

“Hey,” said her Imperial Highness, Radiant Heir to the House of Dominicus. “This is a bit of a shitshow, but hopefully you’re smart enough to realize that the best thing you can do is stay out of my way.”

“I’m the greatest necromancer my House has ever produced,” Harrow said. The other woman’s deep voice echoed strangely in her head. She wondered, is this what falling in love was like? Or was she having an aneurism? 

Her Imperial Highness looked at her with interest. “I only get to watch the boring ship-warding shit, show me something cool?”

One of the guards at the far door stirred, the faintest movement of his hand. There were two of them, blue in the shadows. Had they been there before?

“They didn’t allow us any bone,” Harrow said rigidly, face burning. “In case we tried to assassinate you.”

“Oh, right.” She cocked her head. “How would you do it?”

“Assassinate you?”

“Yeah. Right now. If you really, really wanted to. Bearing in mind I’m holding this sword and I’m really fucking fast.”

Harrow refused to look at the guards.

“How fast?”

They were about eight feet apart. Then they weren’t. Harrow had an impression of coiled, perfectly managed strength, the heavy blade whipped through the air as if it was as light as straw, coming to rest with the point against Harrow’s jugular, oddly gentle against her pulse. Her breath touched Harrow’s. She could hear her own heartbeat overlaid against another in a weird double rhythm, and her own was faster.

“I’d pull your third rib through your left ventricle.”

The Heir to Dominicus’ face fell a little. The point of the sword did not.

“I was hoping for something a bit more spectacular.”

Harrow nodded at one of the guards, but the other woman’s control was so absolute that the point of the sword resting against her throat did not break the skin. “I could pull _his_ third rib through your left ventricle, if you prefer. I’d still fell you before you reached me.”

Harrow risked a glance upward. She caught an impression of a crooked grin, and eyes that were – that were – no.

“Fuck off, you would not.”

“I might not,” she admitted, forced to be precise. “It would be quicker and more efficient to use yours, and I would still have time to deal with the guards, they’re further away and not as fast.” At the edge of her gaze, that grin widened. Harrow sucked in a breath, as if about to plunge her head underwater.

“May I ask a question, your Imperial Highness?”

“Gideon.”

The name echoed weirdly in her head. But she’d known it, after all. It was in all the books. She tried to shape her mouth around it, but her tongue would not make the sounds.

“Why the Ninth?”

The smile took on a hard edge, became all teeth.

“Because I want to piss off God.” After that heretical statement, she held out her hand. Harrow stared at it. Her fingers were long, lean, and wildly calloused. “You don’t seem terrible, which is a bonus, but I’d marry you if you were a toothless crone, which frankly I thought you would be, nobody’s seen anyone from your House in like a hundred years. So, what do you think, Reverend Daughter? Want to wed the hottest swordswoman in the galaxy? Just kidding, you have no choice. But do you?”

Harrow’s palms were slick, and there was wet on her cheeks.

“Oh, Harrowhark,” Abigail Pent said softly behind her. Harrow jumped almost out of her skin. The other woman – Gideon – kept holding out her hand and smiling, as if frozen in time.

“Why are you _here_ ,” Harrow snarled.

“Because you won’t let me go. I have to imagine that at some level you know you need my help.”

“I do not _need your help_ , I need to –” she stared at Gideon’s hand. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It came away red.

“You need to repair what you severed,” Abigail prompted. “Why don’t you try taking her hand? I think perhaps we haven’t been literal enough about this.”

If there was anything worse than Abigail Pent invading the most important encounter of her life, it was Abigail Pent giving her _relationship advice_.

“I don’t – we don’t –”

Harrow bit her lip until blood welled against her tongue. She reached out and rested her fingertips on the Gideon-statue’s outstretched palm. Bare, skin to skin. She was warm, so warm Harrow flinched back, but Gideon’s hand shot out and grabbed hers, and time started again. Her cavalier lurched, stumbled, and shook herself like a dog. 

“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Where are we? Wait, no, that is not my first question, my first question is, what the _fuck_ are you wearing? Is that a _dress_?” 

“Well, that's not precisely what I thought would happen,” said Lady Abigail. Gideon froze.

“Harrow,” Gideon said slowly, “Don’t freak out, but there’s a ghost behind you.” 

In retrospect, that was extremely funny, but the windows shattered and water started pouring in before any of them had the chance to appreciate it.

“We’re in the River,” said Harrow. Abigail nodded. “And under attack by an invasive soul who someone with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic – me, apparently – has styled The Sleeper.” Abigail nodded again.

“We’re in a river?” said Gideon. Her thumb absently rubbed across Harrow’s knuckles over and over again. The repetitive touch was slowly turning her marrow to water, feeding a starvation so deep and ancient that it seemed essential to Harrow’s being. 

“Stop it,” she hissed at Gideon, and squeezed her fingers, white-knuckled. Gideon squeezed back. “Ignore her, she’s an idiot,” Harrow said to Abigail. They were all back in the little bedroom where Harrow had recovered, awkwardly perched on the four-poster bed, which was beginning to rock as the water rose around them. Ortus, his knees up at his chest, stared at their joined hands with an unreadable expression on his face. 

“It’s my mother,” Gideon said. “The invasive soul. Apparently she’s a nutcase. A lot to catch you up on. Seriously, though,” she added, having dropped that bombshell, “why are you wearing that?” 

“We’re in a bubble created by Harrow’s subconscious,” Abigail said. “We abandoned the previous scenario because it was unstable.”

“I hate to be the one to point this out, darling, but this one is also unstable,” Magnus said, as a screaming corpse floated past the window.

“But you can’t deny this one went the distance.”

“I thought it was very romantic,” Ortus said hollowly. “Look at their hands.”

Harrow and Gideon looked down at the same time. They were wearing matching rings of braided bone.

“Aw,” said Gideon.

“Fuck off,” Harrow muttered, acutely embarrassed.

“What I want to know,” Abigail said, “Is how your cavalier got here.”

Harrow whipped around, gripped by something awful, but Gideon already had her hands raised, one tangled with Harrow’s. “Hold on to your bones, I’m not dead! You’re not – we’re not dead? But I think we might be unconscious. And extremely fucked.”

“You’re not a necromancer,” hissed Harrow. “You shouldn’t be able to travel.”

“Yeah, you’re not a cavalier, but you can hold a sword and learn to stab people with it, and _unlike some people_ , I’ve been working out.”

“ _What does that even –_ ”

A crash shook the windows.

“I think it’s time we moved,” said Abigail. “I imagine the Lyctor’s room is where we left it. We have some final business to attend to.”

Harrow’s world was shifting around her. This new mystery barely registered, if she was honest. Gideon’s hand was strong and warm in her own. The intimacy of it made her stomach turn and her skin itch. She could not even conceive of letting go.

“New plan,” Gideon said. “Fuck up the Sleeper, aka my mom, a stone cold revenge machine. Fuck up the Beast. Go home. Fuck up God, question mark. Dot dot dot. Profit.”

“That’s not a plan, it’s an agenda,” said Harrow. 

“Bite me,” said Gideon. 

“I’m opening the door,” Magnus said. “Brace yourselves.”

A sludgy wave of trash- and blood-filled water slapped against the bed, which rocked alarmingly.

“Hmm,” said Abigail, “Perhaps if –” 

She beamed at Ortus as he plucked a long pole from the water and positioned himself. On the other side of the bed, Magnus did the same. “Perfect, thank you, Ortus. Ready, and – punt!”

Their four-poster bed, now floating, drifted towards the door. Its drapes, black, fluttered wetly around them. Around them, viscera bobbed gently against the patterned wallpaper.

“Your subconscious is really fucking weird,” said Gideon.

“At least it isn’t _Frontline Titties of the Fifth_.”

Grunting, Ortus and Magnus propelled them through the door, which now led not into the hallway, but out onto open water. For a terrible moment, Harrow thought they were in the River proper, but then Abigail said, “Hah!” and they drifted up alongside a jetty Harrow vaguely remembered Gideon fishing from once.

“Ah, the organs, I almost missed them,” said Magnus, surveying the pulsating pink tentacles wrapped around the east tower.

“Oh, _yuck_ ,” said Gideon, with feeling.

“Not the time for dallying, my dears,” Abigail said, already clearing unmentionable detritus away from the door. Ortus and Magnus hurried to help her.

“You want to know what’s going on up there?" said Gideon.

“That depends on whether it’s likely to convince me we’re not immediately about to die and this is a waste of time.”

“Best not, then,” Gideon said cheerfully, shifting her grip on Harrow’s hand.

“Well, thank you, this has been heartening.” Harrow had the awful feeling that she might be smiling, and tried to pull herself together. It wouldn’t do to completely fall to pieces now.

“You know me,” Gideon said. “I’m all about maintaining morale.”

Harrow and her cavalier walked into Canaan House for the last time, their fingers intertwined like their souls.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [redacted] for beta and for the title!
> 
> (The title is from the Catholic Litany of the Saints, a very old prayer. The full quote is "a subitanea et improvisa morte libera nos, Domine" - from a sudden and unprovided death deliver us, O Lord.)


End file.
